Friday, May 31, 2013

The last
major political leader from the Congress to die of natural causes was Vilasrao Deshmukh in August 2012. While
Deshmukh seemed quite active in the months prior to his death it was a surprise
to find he was ailing so seriously and a last minute liver transplant was also
aborted because the donor died before the operation. Other than the scams that
he was accused of Deshmukh was quite a popular leader in Maharashtra. Final reports on his death indicate he
was suffering from liver failure which led to kidney failure which led to lungs
failure and all of these led to heart failure. That sounds like total chaos, a
lot like the Congress and UPA which are suffering multiple ailments.

For 16
consecutive days now our media has been soaked in the IPL scam with just a pause for minor news items like naxal attacks
or ministers resigning in Andhra. All of them just want one thing; N.
Srinivasan to resign as BCCI president. TimesNow
has gone a step beyond NDTV, CNN-IBN and HeadlinesToday, the channel is now
calling it “Crusade for Cricket”. When
George Bush used the term “crusade” after the 9/11 attacks for the war against
terrorism he quickly withdrew that term and settled for ‘Operation enduring
freedom’. I hope the liberals and Islamists don’t attack TimesNow for carrying
out a “Crusade” for Cricket. All of them want Srinivasan to resign on moral
grounds. It’s a fair demand but the political leadership from which most morals
flow in public life has long dumped morals. The last time morals were seen in
Indian Cricket was when GR Vishwanath
recalled Bob Taylor for a wrong dismissal in the 1979-80 Golden Jubilee test.
Well, Taylor went on to score a century and India lost the match. Since then it
has been “law will take its course”.
But the IPL scam reporting was helping bury many a Congress-UPA crime but when
organs fail, they are bound to give a rude shock. The Chattisgarh naxal attack of May 25 was one massive heart attack to
the Congress, BJP and the media.

Now that
more details of the Maoists attack trickle in it seems quite obvious that the
attack was a conspiracy hatched by a politician or a group of politicians. The
Maoists seemed to know who will be there in the convoy and sought out specific
politicians as targets and killed them. Their main target was Mahendra Karma, who supposedly founded
the Salwa Judum, but they allowed Kawai Lakma, a close associate of Ajit Jogi,
to escape. Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh all rushed to Raipur.
Amazing! 14 Congress lives and 7 security personnel were killed. I’m quite sure these three Congress heads
didn’t rush to Raipur for the security personnel killed.

At the Governor’s
meet over the incident, where neither SoniaG nor RahulG had any right to be
present, RahulG kept asking “who is responsible”? Funny, isn’t it? A man who is responsible for nothing and
to no one in this country asks that question. A man whose own constituency
Amethi has failed on most development index and who is an “Eid ka chand” in
parliament talks about responsibility. This was the guy who was partying after
26/11. This is the same Pappu who said “Congress
supported BJP during Kargil”. Responsibility? Chest-beating at best! Never
mind! And Minister Jairam Ramesh screams “we will win the war against
naxalism”. How he proposes to do so, nobody knows.

Contrast all
the drama of the trinity from Congress to the deadly attack on CRPF and Police
personnel in April 2010. 75 were ambushed and brutally killed. SoniaG, RahulG
or MMS didn’t rush to Dantewada. It seems only when their party men are
attacked that wakes up politicians. This must make the naxals feel that
targeting politicians pays better dividends. The moronery and hypocrisy of MMS
and his party wasn’t more visible than in the fact that in October 2009 he
grandly stated naxalism “is the greatest internal threat to India”. Well, what has he done about it? We
don’t know. Hundreds have died since then. That statement by MMS wasn’t made at
some security meet it was made to reporters at a function of the National
Centre for Performing Arts. Very artful
indeed! The horrible fact is that the GOI has no clue, no policy on how to
deal with the naxals. And they reward convicted Maoist sympathisers like
Binayak Sen with positions in the Planning Commission.

The MSM was
forced to reluctantly report the Chattisgarh killings only to return to the IPL
scam all over again. One fails to understand why this obsession with a betting
and fixing scam which is relatively petty when compared to other issues of
importance. Let’s not complain too much. In between there were some other
issues too. RahulG, continuing his moronic utterances, made a grand statement
to his partymen “My mother is lenient
but I am strict” he said. Very nice! And following this stupidity NDTV held
a debate on who is the tougher boss, SoniaG or RahulG. I’m not joking, take a look yourself. For NDTV
that’s a serious issue to be debated as it is a serious concern for voters.

It also
helps that the IPL scam coverage helped to completely ignore the indictment of
Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit by the
Lokayukta. She has been indicted for misusing 22 crores of public money for
promotions and has been asked to repay 11 crores. And while the IPL coverage
was on and was brutally interrupted by the Chattisgarh disaster the Congress
continued to run Bharat Nirman ads.
Irony! In the commercial breaks while reporting the deadly Maoist attacks TV
channels were running a “minority
appeasement” ad under Bharat Nirman. The ad claims 1.65 lakh crores worth
of loans/scholarships to 65 lakh minority students. I wonder how they arrived
at these figures. In another ad the Congress claims having started 27 new
central universities in print and 11 of the same in the TV ad. Why these
differences? Media usually doesn’t debate content of commercial ads as a
policy. But the BN ads are not mere commercials. They are govt and political
ads whose content needs verification and analysis. The amounts involved are far
higher than the IPL betting scam. The BN ads on TV and in print have
conflicting numbers in many ads and our media won’t verify or question it. Why
should they? After all, they are the beneficiaries. There must be a warning
from upstairs: ‘No negative news about
Congress, else no BN ads for you, so behave’!

Amidst all
this the Telengana issue has started
to burn again. A senior Congress CWC member, Keshav Rao, has quit the party in
support of Telengana and joined the TRS party. I guess the politicians will
push Telengana to a stage where it will create more Maoists and then will sit
and discuss strategy. RahulG will ask “who is responsible?” and our media will
be happy to show sensational scenes of riots and self-immolation. And while the
Chattisgarh attacks happened our Home Minister happily extended his stay in the
US. His reason for extension was an appointment with an eye doctor on May 28. Sushil Kumar Shinde’s casual approach
is quite reflective of the failure of the Congress party and its govt. So while
there is tall talk by the Congress on its achievements it seems the Indian
colleges, hospitals and doctors are simply not good enough for their party
members. It’s always US or some foreign country. (Read An Idiot’s guide to Bharat Nirman) Remember, during the December 2012 agitation over the Delhi
gangrape Shinde famously said... let me just quote him:

"It is very easy to ask the Home Minister to go to India Gate
and talk. Tomorrow if any other party's demonstration goes on why should not
the Home Minister go there. Tomorrow Congress and BJP will demonstrate,
tomorrow Maoists will come here to demonstrate with weapons,"… Shinde said
the people should understand the government's role and the government should
not go anywhere. This will happen tomorrow, for any government. Why should the
government go anywhere"?There,
that should tell you how Shinde views Maoists but it proves that MMS, SoniaG
and RahulG wouldn’t have rushed to Raipur if the Congressmen weren’t killed. And
today, May 31, when Shinde did manage to visit Chattisgarh he again made the
most moronic statement: “This Maoist attack is worse
than any terrorism”. The Congress didn’t feel so when the 75 jawans were
killed in Dantewada.

The latest
to play the victim is Aruna Roy. She
has quit the private durbar of SoniaG called NAC because she is unhappy the
govt is not implementing policies for the poor (that she wants?). In short
Aruna Roy is telling us: Govt bad,
SoniaG good! Surprising, since the Bharat Nirman ads claim they have done a
lot for the poor. Congress has even given a darshan of Metro rail in Delhi to
village bumpkins. What more do you want? In a chat with NDTV (who else) Roy
mentioned she would now like to work from the “outside”. Really? When exactly
was she working from “within”? The NAC is not a part of the govt so she was
anyway an outsider in SoniaG’s coterie trying to legislate for the parliament. So
like it or not even a Darbari from SoniaG’s coterie is not happy with govt’s
work for the poor.

In conclusion,
one has to make the sad comparison between the final days of Vilasrao Deshmukh
and his party itself. It is now a party and a govt that is suffering multiple
ailments of a serious nature. Many critical parts have failed beyond repair and
it makes a bad picture.

SoniaG, MMS,
RahulG, Ministers, Policy paralysis, foreign policy failure, economic
sluggishness, corruption of media, never-ending number of scams, low morale of
army and police, and it goes on and on and on. When Deshmukh died he must have
at the very least left a fair bit of assets for his family. Each failure of the
Congress results in worsening shock. When the UPA2 dies, the nation will be
five years older and deeper in debt and our media friends will still be chasing
Srinivasan. Cause of death: Multiple
organ failure.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

My gut
feeling says nobody in India gives a damn about elections in Pakistan except
for a general knowledge of the final outcome. Some party that Nawaz Sharif
heads won the elections and he will be sworn in PM. There are exceptions
though. The only ones who care about what happens in Pakistan are in the GOI,
the track2 establishment, some power-mongers in our news media, the Scotch
circuit and Bollywood. And then there is the “Evoluter” Barkha Dutt. She is a specialist in “evolving” leaders
and personalities. I’m sure readers of this blog remember her “Evolution of Rahul Gandhi”. She has tried very hard with the “evolution of Imran Khan” too and failed again.

So it’s not
just Barkha Dutt (BD) but Rajdeep Sardesai (RS) also wants us to
learn lessons from Pakistan. I would rather you read the book ‘Leadership
secrets of Attila the Hun’ but never mind. So both RS and BD turn to the mother-ship
of their ‘Unholy Trinity’, Hindustan Times, to write on the lessons to be
learnt from Pak elections. RS calls it “Bowling
a dot ball” and BD simply calls it “Lessons
from Pakistan”. Considering RS is a Cricket lover his title is natural and
considering BD is a Pakistan lover her title is natural too. But when you look
at the content, both are deceptively identical. That’s their talent – deception. What both are trying to do
is to draw lessons from Imran Khan’s failure to win and equate it to another
forceful personality in Indian politics. Do you really want me to name that
Indian personality? I don’t think so and these two propagandists don’t name him
or anyone directly either.

But on an
overall assessment Rajdeep does make a lot more sense than Barkha. It’s merely
becausewhen he is off TV RS puts a lot
of thought behind what he writes or says and I have said this often. Here’s
something critical that RS writes in his piece:

“Imran’s cheerleaders genuinely believed that the youth of the
country was fully behind him. The social media campaigns were seen to be a
critical element of this age group’s desire for change. Imran was able to
harness social media effectively and draw new faces into his political party,
but when it came to the crunch it became clear the ‘youth’ factor was a little
exaggerated as was the appeal of a twitter and facebook generation. The social
network universe will always be lesser than the political universe. In the heat
and dust of the countryside, it doesn’t really matter how many followers you
have on twitter. These followers can create an echo effect across media
platforms; what they cannot do is influence voting patterns across a diverse
population”.

Fair enough!
But who in hell ever told RS or any MSM person that SM claimed it would
influence elections? Nobody did, except
the fakes in the MSM. Secondly, the lesson that RS draws is truly
applicable to Arvind Kejriwal &
his party rather than the “other person”
that RS is targeting. The other person that RS targets with his comments has
worked his way up from scratch and has proven electoral success against the
severest propaganda, vilification and witch-hunt by RS & Co. In contrast,
Imran Khan has received tremendous bootlicking from the media, including Indian
media. That’s a major difference. So it has nothing to do with SM. The awful
truth is that anything that TV and MSM hype falls flat on the ground. But RS
has been largely fair in his assessment. So let’s get to BD for whom Pakistan
is second home as it is for her channel, NDTV. Take a look at these pics. They
are all from all the interviews she has held with Imran Khan in the last two
years, at least 4 of them.

These are
four of them and there could be other interviews that I may have missed. Then
just before the elections when Imran was injured BD found a substitute in his
sister Aleema and interviewed her in the hospital that treated Imran. The first
pic (with BD in green) is where Barkha mentioned the “evolution of Imran Khan”. I’m not joking you can hear it on Youtube. This is when she was
talking about his autobiography and so enamoured was she that she was even
discussing his hairstyle. Is that all? No! After her September 2012 interview
with Imran, NDTV headlined that he would like to borrow from Bihar CM Nitish
Kumar. Ah yes, Nitish the “secular messiah”.

I get a
feeling Nitish Kumar might get a scare if he finds out Imran borrowed
from him and failed. And she claims Pak media pays him too much attention. And
after all the swooning over him BD writes:

“As the eventual outcome shows one man (Imran) had overstated his performance without a trace
of self-doubt; the other (Sharif) ended up being so cautious that the scale of
his victory came as a surprise even to him…. Imran Khan's innings are proof
that media googlies aren't enough to bowl out an old-style veteran of politics.
The media in Pakistan had virtually anointed Khan as victor before the votes
could be cast or counted”. Really? But does the media anywhere learn any
lessons? Has Barkha learnt any lessons from her evolution of the Gandhi prior
to UP elections? It doesn’t seem so. Why else would she and her channel be so
heavily addicted to Imran Khan? And all these googlies were only from Pak media
and not from her? Laugh till you die!

Now let’s
see what she concludes and then what Rajdeep concludes. It makes quite
interesting reading:

BD: For us in the media there is also a message in what happens
when you script a complex political battle as a clash of personalities. It's a
global news instinct and one that makes for better copy. But at the same time
it often defies the arithmetic of what makes a party win in a parliamentary
democracy. Elections in our part of the world are not a contest between
personality cults. The face-off between the Rahul Gandhi vs Narendra Modi
camps, online and offline, may have precious little to do with the reasons for
victory and defeat in 2014.

RS: Finally, Imran’s mixed results in these elections reveal the
limitation of charisma in sub-continental politics. Yes, there have been film
stars who have achieved some success in electoral politics. MGR and NTR truly
stand out in this context, cinematic legends who were able to transfer their
celluloid power onto the political stage in spectacular fashion. But MGR in
particular had a strong AIADMK network to assist him; his folk hero image was a
bonus. Other ‘star’ politicians have realised that politics is more than just
dialogue delivery and good looks.

I cannot
help believing that these two people never look in the mirror. Who scripted the
Rahul-Modi combat? No one except the media! As far as I know and even genuinely
honest observers will admit Rahul is a total non-performer, has shown no
accountability and his utterances are so full of stupidity that any comparison
to Modi is even comic. But the media does this to protect the queen, Sonia Gandhi as I have said repeatedly.
The media is willing to make RahulG the sacrificial goat against Modi while
making sure they keep all the weaknesses, drawbacks and incompetence of Sonia
Gandhi cloaked from exposure. 2014 is not a battle between Rahul and Modi as
our media morons keep repeating deceptively like a parrot. It’s a battle
between Modi and SoniaG. I would say even Imran Khan is a better political leader
than RahulG any single day. He has proven leadership at least in some
endeavour.

Lastly, both
RS and BD peddle this atrocious fallacy in their articles in different words. Let
me use BD’s words: “Finally, in the absolute decimation
of the party that the Bhuttos built is a message that lineage and ancestry only
carry you so far in politics and no further. Misgovernance, inefficiency and
corruption will be punished by voters, no matter how glamorous or brave one's
pedigree is. Assumptions based on privilege; charm and charisma; media
endorsements - none of these are accurate clues to the mind of the voter. So
beware all those who claim to know what will happen in 2014”.

Both RS and
BD demonstrate a fear that the Gandhis, that they have so faithfully served all
these years, may meet the same fate as the Bhuttos. But they mislead when they
say that lineage and ancestry carry you only so far. Coming from a slave media
that is the worst untruth you will hear. Nehru, Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi and
again another Gandhi is what has ailed India all this while. A mature media
should have been instrumental in getting the people out of the clutches of
slavery to lineage and ancestry. In contrast, both RS and BD have the deepest
contempt for the guy who rose even when he doesn’t have such lineage and
ancestry and started life as a “Chaiwalla”. So both these media celebs continue
their proven hypocrisy.

It is not
Indians who need to learn a lesson from Pakistan but Barkha who seriously needs
to do so. She must learn that all her propaganda has failed electorally. She
failed to evolve Rahul Gandhi and she failed to evolve Imran Khan. Does she
have it in her to learn and change tracks and serve the cause of genuine
reporting? Evolution awaits her!

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Someone
wisely said "If you can't blind
them with brilliance, then bedazzle them with bullshit..." This works
fine for our media folks. For the eighth straight day yesterday they continued
to fool the people with the distraction of IPL Spotfixing issue. This is not to suggest that they shouldn’t cover
it but it certainly doesn’t deserve the 24X7 coverage that it is being given.
Perhaps there were orders from upstairs that the GOI didn’t want adverse
coverage of its non-performance on Rajiv
Gandhi’s death anniversary and particularly so on the 4th anniversary of UPA2. Both these events passed with
minimal assessment of the UPA and Congress performance. The most corrupt govt
in the history of the democratic world and the most non-performing one too. That
is how I would summarise the govt of Sonia
Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. The
latter is easily the most insipid PM this country has ever had. There was
another event that the GOI may not have wanted to spoil; the Chinese Premier’s
visit.

So
Spotfixing was handy for the media to fool the nation. And there was enough incentive
too. The spate of Bharat Nirman ads
by the Congress with public money has pushed all other ads into back of the
mind position. Some have compared it to the “India Shining” campaign of BJP in 2004 which backfired. But the Nirman
ads are being viewed in the age of Social Media (SM) which doesn’t hesitate to
call BS when it sees it. A couple of news media houses have debated the Nirman
ads but other than that most news channels are just happy to enjoy the luxury
dole that has dropped into their lap. Why complain! The other big difference
from 2004 is that the Congress cannot help making you believe that everything
in this country was brought to you by the Nehrus and Gandhis, the rest of India
are just passengers who ride their train. You know, like if you travel on
national highways of the Golden Quadrilateral the pics of AB Vajpayee have been
removed and replaced by Sonia Gandhi. It’s like ‘Made by Sonia Gandhi’ even when she had absolutely nothing to do
with it.

The core
Congress message of these Bharat Nirman ads are: 1) You are a bunch of idiots and you can be fooled over and over
again. 2) You are not smart enough
to notice our hypocrisy. 3) We have
nothing brilliant to show for performance so you we are going to bedazzle you
with bullshit.

So let’s
look at a couple of these Bharat Nirman ads and see what the Congress and the
GOI really want to communicate to us. The first one is about the great
educational institutions their govt has created so that your kid never has to
go abroad (Video 1.01mins)

Voila! Move
over US and Japan! Our kids have now made robots that serve tea to guests. I
can believe that part definitely because Indian kids have proven themselves to
be smarter than many others in the world. But for all the screaming about so
many great institutions the Congress has created so that your children don’t have
to go abroad, where do the ‘motor mouths’ of the Congress have their kids
going? You have unauthorised spokies Digvijaya
Singh and Sanjay Jha of the Congress
thrilled being in New York for the graduation of the sons and nephews. Of
course, their party boss doesn’t trust any Indian doctor or hospital at all.
Nobody knows her illness but whenever she sneezes she rushes off to New York,
Amsterdam or Rome or wherever ‘Veni Vidi Vici’ will take her to be treated. So
these institutions are created for desi bumpkins by the Nehru-Gandhi clan, so
be grateful and vote for Congress.

As a marketing
person, I can tell you, one of the first things in selling a product is to
imagine a picture of who your customer is. Preferably even draw a sketch of
that customer or group. You will find that exercise quite enjoyable. The
Congress is a master at drawing this picture. In other words they are quite clear who their voter is. This is a
good thing for any political party. They are even better, they ensure their
customer stays the way he has always been; a
perfect village bumpkin or a village idiot. Keep them permanently in low
education levels and low development of their villages so that they marvel at
the wonders of the world the Congress creates. This village bumpkin explains
how he saw magic stairs that go up
and down. He describes how this that magic thing goes “Trrrrrrr” above ground and “Trrrrrrr” underground and how it has
magic doors that open and close. Whoa! What could that possibly be? And the
other village bumpkins are stunned and wonder if the Bumpkin No.1 has gone
crazy or senile. Watch (0.34mins):

The
political tactic of the Congress is stark in the ad. Keep them uneducated, keep them in unemployment. Then the
white-skinned ones will come and deliver “magic” to them and overawe them with a
basket of doles like NREGA or FSB and make them feel “look at what your mai-baap have done for you”. If after 65 years of
independence our villagers have to be still overawed by metro trains then it
speaks a lot for how pathetic our govts have been, mostly the Congress govt.
Considering the first metro started in Kolkata around 1986-87 you can calculate
how far behind in time other cities are. And even the urban transport system is
named JNURM after Jawaharlal Nehru.
So there you go, if you have BRTS or better buses in your city, it’s a gift
from Nehru. Be grateful, bumpkins! While
the media does analyse whether these Bharat Nirman ads are “image make-overs”
they don’t look at how clinically deceptive they are. Why would they? After all
the Gandhi name spells money all over.

Lately, the
Congress has been screaming the Opposition is “anti-poor” because the Food
Security Bill (FSB) wasn’t passed in the last parliament session. That was
washed out over Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal. How long can you sustain the
poor with doles and overawe them with metro rails? Well, as long as you “walk the dog” and make sure the
crumbs are delivered to the poodles in time. Considering the PM and Sonia
Gandhi are so concerned for the poor, how does it explain an expense of over 140 crores over the last 3 years on various anniversaries?

There are many newspapers and channels which survive purely on the govt doles. Not surprising! This is why I once
wrote “Saving Shekhar’s Express”
on the ads doled out to the paper. That is just the official spend. If you add
up other state expenditures and other surrogate ads the total could go well
over 300 crores (Do read “The Gandhi Septology”). Now on top of all these comes election and boom-time with
Bharat Nirman. Do you really expect the poodles to be honest? Naturally, the
media doesn’t challenge it when RahulG and SoniaG go around stating “RajivG
brought computer to India” or “Nehru brought gas to India”. These statements
are now the butt of jokes on the SM. That’s how Bharat was Nirmaned!

The Chinese Premier
was recently here after the Ladakh incursion. Seems peace was made and that
just reminded me of something; an old story. When the Chinese and Japanese made
peace after the world war the Chinese decided to present the Japs with a gift.
They presented them with a 1mm thick and
one-metre long pure-Gold thread. The Japs accepted it but were stunned how
the Chinese could create such a marvel. So they got together their best
engineers to find out how they could do better. The Japanese finally got it and
they drilled a hole right through the 1mm gold thread and presented it to
Germany. The Germans accepted it but were rattled that the Chinese and Japs
could be better than them at such marvellous engineering and their govt couldn’t
rest till they had outdone those two. So the German govt employed their best
scientists to make an improvement to the thread. Finally, the German engineers
created an even thinner golden thread and passed it through the thin hole in
the 1mm gold thread given by the Japs and tied a knot at both ends. The German
govt was thrilled and told the Japs and Chinese what they had accomplished.

Years later
the Germans presented the golden thread to the Indian govt. Our govt didn’t waste
any time calling engineers and scientists to add value to it. The big boss just
ordered that it be named as “Rajiv
Gandhi Golden Wonder” and the village bumpkins came and marvelled at this
wonder. That is how Bharat Nirman happens. Anything that is done, anything that
is created with people’s money and energy is courtesy some Nehru or Gandhi. Build
anything, dole out anything and just put a stamp on it: “Made by Gandhis”. Bharat Nirman!

Update: This post quoted some figures from a Newslaundry report on advertisement figures on May 21 Rajiv Gandhi death anniversary. The site has since reported those figures being inaccurate and therefore the figures quoting them have been removed.